Mojito

Taste

On the nose it's bright lime and cool mint. On tasting, the shake really does spread the mint through every sip instead of leaving it sulking at the bottom of the glass. Rich demerara syrup gives you a rounder, faintly molasses-edged sweetness that plain sugar can't manage. The rum sits underneath, more felt than tasted, until a warm rummy note turns up on the finish under the fizz. Properly refreshing, and dangerously easy in the sun.

Origin

The Mojito's history is genuinely murky, and a lot of what gets repeated about it doesn't hold up. The most common story traces it to a 16th-century proto-drink called "El Draque," supposedly mixed by a cousin of the English privateer Sir Francis Drake using aguardiente, mint, sugar and lime. It's a good story, but there's no actual record of Drake, or his cousin, ever setting foot in Cuba, which makes the connection shaky at best. A more grounded account has the drink evolving through the early 20th century, with the Bacardi company's rise helping shift the base spirit from harsh aguardiente to rum, and the name settling into "Mojito" somewhere along the way, as described by Cuban writer Frederick Villoch in 1940. Some historians also credit American Prohibition-era tourism, and the Mint Julep it brought with it, as a bigger influence than any 16th-century pirate connection. What's certain is the drink is Cuban. Everything before that is best-guess history.